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Rotherham’s Disgrace – Why has no one been called to account?

So, once again, RMBC has been publicly shown to be completely inadequate in its ability to protect a Rotherham child from harm and sexual exploitation by despicable, wicked, evil Rotherham men.

And, once again, all the multitude of warning signs were there for all to see. But being RMBC, once again they gave those signs the “Nelson’s eye” and it’s all turned out to be such an unpredictable horror for them.

Has this failure to act to protect the town’s children cost any of the highly-paid RMBC Elected Members and Officers their jobs?

Has there been a very public apology from Da Dodger at this corporate failure which occurred within his organisation and on his watch?

No not a bit of it.

No public apology or confirmation of sackings, reprimands, lessons learned, demotions – in fact no penalties for failure at all on the part of those who are well-paid and tasked with the legal duty of protection of our town’s children.

No, everyone will have moved on to bigger and better things. Some will even delude themselves into thinking themselves as worthy candidates to head-up our county’s statutory crime fighting agency. And the Elected Members will continue to draw higher than Sheffield Council remuneration for yet another lack-lustre discharge of their public duties.

12 thoughts on “Rotherham’s Disgrace – Why has no one been called to account?”

Thanks for bringing our attention to this very important issue, Grald-Hunter.

Rotherham Politics readers must be left scratching their heads at this tale of incompetence by officers and failures by those tasked with providing political oversight which have resulted in the death of a child!

Why indeed, has no one even been disciplined for this outrage? Just what do you have to do in Rotherham to attract disciplinary action? Kill someone?

Shaun Wright has culpability for this one and should resign from the Council forthwith!

Shaun Wright for South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner? You really must be joking!!!!

The murder of this innocent young girl was a tragedy in every sense of the word. Of course there are lessons to be learnt as the serious case review concluded but it’s impossible to conclude that with the best will in the world that this heinous act of brutal murder could have been prevented by the relevant services.

There do need to be some serious answers and only Cllr Stone will do to provide them. Rotherham residents need to be assured of what measures the council has taken to learn from this report to protect our most vulnerable. An apology is required but convincing us lessons have been learn’t and acted upon is far more important.

I’m sorry to have to report mutterings on Kimberworth Park that the BNP are already looking to exploit this leak and put their own racist slant on it.

With regards to Cllr Wright we’ve already documented the 2009 OFSTED report criticising his department. Please find below a link highlighting the 2006 OFSTED report, the question he needs to answer is why the decline between 06 and 09? and the worry for us is, is this what we can expect for our police service.

I am posting the statement from the safeguarding board which will explain the rationale behind the decision to redact parts of the report, including the timeline and the process that was followed. Hope this is helpful to readers of this blog.

The safegaurding board refutes in the strongest possible terms any suggestion that information was redacted from the published report for any reason other than to protect the interests of Laura’s daughter, immediate family and other third parties.

This report relates to Laura’s case and it was not the job of this serious case review to review and publish the circumstances and details of any third parties.

It was the Board’s initial view that the publication of the full overview report would not be in the interests of Laura’s family. That view is already in the public domain.

However, in the absence of such an agreement by the Department for Education (DfE), the Board worked to the guidance provided by the DfE which advised the appropriate redaction and anonymising of information to protect the privacy and welfare of any vulnerable children.

As has already been stated, the Board stands by the process that was followed in determining which elements of the finished report would not be placed in the public domain, on the basis that it would breach the confidentiality of family members and cause distress at what is already a difficult and upsetting time for them.

Throughout the process of this Serious Case Review, the board have worked with Laura’s mother to ensure the publication of a thorough and comprehensive report, but which remained sensitive to the feelings of her family.

The Board is saddened that the opportunity to sustain this has now been denied and it is an indication of how strongly the Board feels about this issue that we were prepared to take legal action to protect the family’s interests.

Professor Cantrill has already made it clear that her starting point was to be as open and transparent as possible, and that her approach was to redact the minimum information possible from her finished report.

The final redacted report was then endorsed at a meeting of the Rotherham Local Safeguarding Children Board on 28th March 2012.

The Department for Education received the proposed redacted version on 2nd April 2012 to enable Ministers to be appropriately briefed. No feedback was received from the Department for Education suggesting that the redactions were considered to be inappropriate and therefore we published the redacted version, in good faith, on 29th May 2012.

OFSTED received a copy of the full report in April 2011. This Serious Case Review was commended by OFSTED as Outstanding in terms of how the issues were identified and how lessons had been learned.

The board maintain that the original redaction of information in no way dilutes the content and impact of this report. The information which was not published was, of course, available to Professor Pat Cantrill, the independent author of the report, and were therefore material in helping her to reach her conclusions and recommendations for improvement.

Anyone who reads the published report will be left in no doubt that this was a robust, comprehensive and thorough review which highlights the areas where the services provided to Laura were not as effective as they could have been, and where local services are expected to learn lessons and improve.

Agencies involved in Laura’s care have already publicly acknowledged where practice has fallen short of what should have been expected, and all of the changes and improvements identified have already been addressed.

The board accepted that there were numerous missed opportunities to work with Laura throughout her life. Arising from the 34 recommendations in this report, significant improvements have been made by the relevant agencies to help ensure that in the future young women like Laura receive better care as a result of this review.

From Jahangir Akhtar –
“Anyone who reads the published report will be left in no doubt that this was a robust, comprehensive and thorough review which highlights the areas where the services provided to Laura were not as effective as they could have been, and where local services are expected to learn lessons and improve”.

“Agencies involved in Laura’s care have already publicly acknowledged where practice has fallen short of what should have been expected, and all of the changes and improvements identified have already been addressed”.

“The board accepted that there were numerous missed opportunities to work with Laura throughout her life. Arising from the 34 recommendations in this report, significant improvements have been made by the relevant agencies to help ensure that in the future young women like Laura receive better care as a result of this review”.

From Grald-Hunter –
And still awesome deafening silence from Da Dodger, who’s paid a shedload of ackers as Leedah, and who hasn’t publically stepped up to the plate to reassure the public that lessons have been learned, that staff have been demoted, dismissed, redeployed, punished or retrained to make up for the myriad of deficiencies that Jahangir Akhtar has stuck his hand up to.

Jahangir Akhtar should be proud of his corporate party line response, however with anything that originates from Town Hall Towers certain facts are missing and does nothing to protect children In Rotherham at risk from sexual exploitation.
One reason not mentioned by Jahangir Akhtar to conceal the report from the public was the impact on community cohesion, fortunately I do not reside in Town Hall Towers, so such gobbledygook is totally lost on me, maybe Cllr Akhtar would like to explain what community cohesion is?
The elephant in the room in this tragic case is the growing issue of grooming and sexual exploitation of vulnerable children.
There needs to be a full and open recognition that within our town there are criminals who target vulnerable children.
In the absence of a coordinated , sustained and highly public zero tolerance strategy towards this activity then the abuse will continue and the vacuum left will be filled by far right groups willing to exploit any opportunity to raise their racist agenda.
So Cllr Akhtar this case happened while you were a Cllr in Rotherham, you are the Deputy Leader and in the absence of any condemnation of sexual grooming by you, I would suggest that the Labour group looks for a more robust individual to take over from Roger Stone, one who will speak out against the criminal gangs of men from within minority communities who abuse our children.
Let me suggest this very simple action.
Cllr Akhtar pick up the phone to your PR dept, invite the key players, Police, Social Services, Education and leaders from minority communities and make a public statement that grooming will not be tolerated in Rotherham and set out what you all intend to today, tomorrow, next month etc .
As Edmund Burke said:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

For the record I went on radio Sheffield when the recent child exploitation case was concluded with the conviction and the jailing of a number of individuals to publicly condemn the perpetrators and fully supported the lengthy sentences handed out by the judge.

I agree we should do everything in our power to protect our children and on that score we have had a number of meetings with police to assure them of our full support in investigating and prosecuting any individuals who prey on the most vulnerable.

I am surprised that anyone would think that we as a council or the police would shirk from our responsibilities to protect our children irrespective of the heritage of the perverts who commit these heinous crimes.

For me this is not a race issue ( FYI – the 7 individuals who were convicted were all English born and bred ) but of people engaged in terrible crimes that warrant the toughest of custodial sentences.

Jahangir, Do you have an audio file of this, we would be delighted to have a listen? Thank you for your forthright views, sure they will be appreciated.
Can you explain the deafening silence from Martin Kimber, Roger Stone and when will at the very least, Alan Hazell fall on his sword, it’s called accountability! And what of the Cabinet Member who was presiding during most of the critical stages, that’s right, Shaun Wright the recent Ex-Mayor and putative £87,000 a year Police and Crime Commissioner! Not a word!

Jahangir Akhtar is missing the critical point, what measurable actions will the council be taking to address grooming and sexual exploitation of vulnerable children here in Rotherham?

These are the points censored by the Safeguarding Board:

Other redacted details include:

• “At the centre of the Child S case is the issue of Child S’s potential involvement in sexual exploitation.”
• Many of the indicators that a child is being groomed for sexual exploitation “were apparent in the case of Child S”.
• Laura was referred to a specialist child sexual exploitation project three months after her 11th birthday.
• Laura was “taken into a car with men who encouraged her to drink alcohol”.
• When she was 13, “Child S and her friend were given alcohol by men at a local takeaway and were asked what they were going to give them in return”. Her mother said that “she had immediately notified the police”.
• Her mother “was shocked when it looked as though Child S was involved with older men” and said that “she had tried to get the police and social care to do something about it”.
• Her mother said that “Child S had always said that what [another girl] was doing was wrong and that she would never mess around with Asian men”.

Jahangir Akhtar has still failed to explain what community cohesion is and why community cohesion was factored into the rationale for trying to prevent the publication of the full report, if the perpetrators in a recent Rotherham case were all English born as Jahangir Akhtar states, then what has community cohesion got to do with it.

Get off the fence Jahangir, today ask your colleague councillors and the Chief Executive why they weren’t all over the media last week apologising for the failure of RMBC departments and setting out how to inform parents and children what grooming is, explain the zero tolerance approach RMBC and their partners will be taking and make sure sufficient resources are in place to make a difference.

Continue to take this meek and mild hands off approach to admitting Rotherham has a problem with grooming and sexual exploitation will result in more children being abused and leaves the door open for the far right to inform the public who is involved in grooming.

Come on Jahangir start as you mean to go on, get a grip of this mess before it gets a total grip of the town.

Jahangir, as Edmund Burke said:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.